I’d climbed a truly evil hill of densely packed million-dollar crackerbox houses, past homeowners leaving to go to the beach. One of them actually wore a t-shirt saying something like “Rucking is fun!” I didn’t stop to dispute the matter because I was huffing and puffing through my mouth, which is not a good sign, and trying to climb better by pushing my knees down with my hands. Way behind the clock, I couldn’t slow down because I was horrified to think that, after this ordeal that I’d prepared for for months, I might finish my 50 miles only to be disqualified for missing the 20-hour cutoff time.

When I rounded another turn, barely in control of my despair, things got worse: my road dead-ended. I should have been able to continue my wretched climb to yet another steep, God-forsaken road, but instead hit a nearly vertical wall of scrub, blocked 100 feet above by a solid wall of weathered, seven-figure rowhouses. Frantic not to have to descend the hill and try again, I hoped that in the cul-de-sac I’d find one of the staircases that sometimes let you dart from one San Francisco sidewalk straight up a hill to the next one. And indeed, there was a man-sized opening in the trees and a ramp! “A staircase!” I hoped, in a fevered delusion that must have been the navigational equivalent of a mirage where someone is sure he sees a Dr. Pepper machine in the desert.

In fact, it was an open storm sewer, steep and slippery with wet leaves, and instantly I fell on my ass and jetted to the bottom as if on a water slide. They don’t exactly design these things for convenient egress, and if I didn’t look like a filthy urchin before, in my sandy canvas ruck and piss-soaked tights, I now looked like some paleozoic amphibian in an alluvial marsh. Holding onto saplings for lack of footing, I got back out onto the cul-de-sac, hoping no one was calling the police, and felt very sorry for myself.

In these moments, however, we can feel buoyed by the strangest occurrences. I received a text that the cadres wanted me to check in with them, now that I’d pushed on alone so that they’d know I hadn’t, well, disappeared down a storm sewer.

I texted back, “Last survivor of Team OCRFitClub rucking the motherf*** out of this. Faithful GF is crewing and making sure I don’t get cannibalized by Nancy Pelosi.” Instantly they shot back, “Right on!” and with that tiny spark of encouragement, they reignited my morale like an oil refinery on fire. I was burning up the road again, supercharged by Lean Solid Girl’s supply drops of coffee and bananas, which hit me like angel dust and jet fuel. Something possessed me to belt out the band Lyube’s hard rock version of the Russian national anthem. (It’s a David Rigert thing. Don’t try to make sense of it.) I was flying high and going to make it. I knew that not as a mathematical conclusion—I actually had little idea how many miles still lay ahead—but as a moral certainty. I could not be stopped.

I’ve put this experience in my “cookie jar,” the name Goggins that gives to the container of memories of past ordeals and triumphs that we reach into when demoralized. “Every time I get … the ‘woe is me’ mentality,” he writes, “… I go into my cookie jar and pull out a memory to remind myself that I am a fucking badass. I put it back in the cookie jar and remember who the fuck I really am.” I had climbed Mt. Davidson in despair and self-pity, behind the clock and hopeless, but I got back in the game with not just the hope of victory but the certainty that I would make it happen.

Newly confident, I started to take in the bigger picture. Much bigger. I am one of those people who waxes sentimental and philosophical on airplanes. At 30,000 feet, I am keenly aware that I am vulnerable and kill-able, riding on thin sheets of aluminum that could fail. We are ephemeral creatures, living out a gnat-like life span on a small ball of rock flying through the vacuum of space. Our bodies are soft, hairless, vulnerable, and dependent. Outside a narrow band of temperature and atmosphere with nutrition and hydration every few hours, they die. And I, personally, will die. “Am I preparing for that?” I wondered on Moraga Ave. “Am I doing the right things now so that I can go with an easy heart, sincerely thinking ‘I am glad because I lived well?’” On these long marches, it seems to be a pattern that I take stock of my life, try to get ready for its end, and sometimes have fleeting encounters with the divine in which, as one friend says, “the veil is thin.”

Two Is One, One Is None

By this time, Lean Solid Girl was running the show from inside her Toyota Prius as de facto team leader. At any moment I only knew my next turn, nothing more. I’d relinquished any sense of an overview because I was moving much too fast now (and feeling too loopy) to keep poring over maps. We were coordinating perfectly: Lean Solid Girl would tell me the next waypoint and what to photograph and then I would plot a route and beat feet. Sometimes we leap-frogged each other in traffic, and when I reached the next destination, I would spot the blue Prius somewhere tucked into one of the parking spots that were becoming scarcer as we reached the center of San Francisco. Then I might dart over for a hurried conference and a hit of what I now thought of as “Ruck Meth”—coffee and a banana—and then streak off again like a (stocky, slightly limping) cheetah.

For the first time in over 12 hours I saw another Goruck team and felt terribly pleased with myself as I bulled past them, imagining them thunderstruck by the sonic boom that I must surely be leaving in my wake on my way to victory.

However, if I was a jet plane, at that moment the wings peeled off. As I scorched pridefully past the other team and checked my route, I noticed my screen dimming. I had only 4% battery left!

That morning when I’d said goodbye to the rest of the team, I had no external phone battery of my own and, a newb to smart phones, no grasp of how much power I was burning up using two navigational apps, Instagram, phone, and text non-stop. I should have begged their batteries off them, even if it meant swimming across San Francisco Bay to return them the next day. Because at the very moment that I waved off from them without extra batteries, in reality my race was finished.

Now, five hours later, I only had time to type “Battery running on fumes” to Lean Solid Girl before the faithful, obsolescent Samsung breathed its last.

You can judge my state of mind by the fact that I did not see this as a huge problem, just one more obstinate barrier that would fall before my determination. Lean Solid Girl was running the whole show anyway—the All-Seeing Eye, I thought of her—and she still had her phone. I would rely on her directions blindly, meet her at the next point and borrow her phone’s camera, and stay in the fight.

Evaluating that objectively now, that was daylight madness. It took only five minutes more for the whole enterprise to crash. Within moments, I had misinterpreted Lean Solid Girl’s directions and rushed hopelessly off course, not even knowing what my next waypoint was (!!), as that information too was entombed inaccessibly in the dead phone.

We were now two people separated in a crowded city with no agreed rally point, and even if a miracle occurred and we found each other, I would never get back on course in time. From the beginning, to have any chance at all I had to average 4 mph, which is a good clip even when you’re fresh, and I would still have had to finish at a dead run to get there in time. No, my race was over now, even if I had Bill Gates’ own phone and a shopping cart full of batteries.

Even in a city where this raises few eyebrows, I looked like someone to stay away from.

I beseeched friendly-looking passers-by to send an “I’m OK” message to Lean Solid Girl for me, but the good people of Presidio Terrace gave wide berth to the vagabond in the strange ensemble of canvas, camouflage, and running tights smelling of rancid urine.

I can scarcely bear to recount the heartbroken march back to the start point, where I could borrow a phone. I knew roughly where to go—north toward the water—but I could only move my feet so fast, as if I were walking in an ankle-deep mud made of disappointment, self-disgust at my bad planning and the betrayal of months of preparation because I cheaped out on batteries, despair at the futility of coming this far for nothing, the black depression that is natural after multiply compounded exhaustion, and gawping disbelief that I had taken a challenge that is physically not a huge deal and still fucked it up. Even now, words fail me.

I failed

There is no happy ending to this story, not yet. I am not interested in self-soothing platitudes about how giving it your best is the true success. It is too late in my life to lie to myself. I failed, period. I have analyzed the failure as honestly as I could stomach. (One lesson: I am frugal, and I chose to cheap out on batteries. If I decide to cheap out on something, I must be able to say to myself, “I am being offered insurance here, and I’m choosing not to buy it.” In this case, I would have bought the ‘insurance.’)

But in lieu of a happy ending, I am proud to report that I am doing it all over again in two weeks, in Seattle, with The Smiling Irishman. Lean Solid Girl is insane, because against my advice but to my very great joy, she is going too, to crew up with Lady Irish in a rental car full of socks, batteries, bananas, and brain power.

And if this doesn’t work, there’s always Dallas. And Nashville. And Philadelphia. And Los Angeles. And Oklahoma City. And Atlanta. And Huntsville. And Chicago. And Cleveland. And Boston. And Charlotte. And Des Moines. And Saint Louis.

“True will power: I’m going to fucking fail, I’m going to fucking fail, I’m going to fucking fail, and I will succeed.”

GORUCK sometimes calls the Star Course their hardest event. I doubt that very much, but this was the toughest I’ve done. I expected that after my surprisingly grueling training hike, but I was still surprised by the added burden of route-finding and the premium put on strategy and organization.

Early in the night, we emerged from a dark trail above the ocean and stumbled upon a throng of people clustered busily around a brightly lit SUV in what appeared to be a news shoot or a crime scene investigation. I was wrong: it was a rival team on the Star Course with a logistical crew that looked like it belonged on the Tour de France. All five doors were open, with light streaming out, and pallets of bottled water and food were broken open and passed out in an atmosphere of calm but rapid efficiency. Next to the vehicle, a woman held up an iPad showing a countdown timer with bright red numbers four inches high. When I walked past, still gaping, they had 0:58 seconds left on their clock. When I reached the next block and looked back, the entire scene had evaporated like a mirage.

With or without a backup crew, a team must assign positions to its members and carry out three key functions:

Walking: Each person must walk for him- or herself, but also somebody has to be certain the group is moving fast enough to adhere to their game plan.

Navigating: As one cadre has said, “You live and die by your route.” At least one person must eye this at all times. In addition to route-finding, sometimes the team might be trying to walk an unmarked footpath in complete darkness and need additionally a sort of “point man” just to figure how to keep to the path from one footstep to the next.

Communicating: This involves both running Instagram and talking with your backup crew, if you have one. On the Star Course, from each waypoint the team must post an Instagram selfie against a specified background (e.g. “Make sure your photo includes the inscription over the gate”) with a specified hashtag. When you are tired, it takes concentration to get these details right and run Instagram with your face in your smudged, grimy screen while speed-walking. Additionally, if you are lucky enough to have friends in a car bringing you supplies, it can be harder than you think to coordinate time and location with them, especially on a nice Saturday morning in city streets, parks, and local attractions, when the city is teeming with traffic, tourists, pedestrians going to brunch, and rollerbladers and cyclists enjoying the sunshine. (This is also why your backup crew really needs two people in the car, one to coordinate with you so that the other can concentrate exclusively on driving safely.)

At a minimum, you want to divide these responsibilities between two people at a time, and more would be even better. When things are busy, you might need separate people handling the phone and Instagram, and in bad navigation conditions it can help to have one person handling the route-finding software, a second person checking their work on Google Maps, and a third person on point who strains their eyes to find the pathway in darkness and rain.

That may sound exaggerated, but on Saturday I was trying to conduct all the functions alone, when I was the last surviving member of my team, and I scarcely had enough fingers to operate Road Warrior, Google Maps, phone, text, Insta, and the “hit list” of way point instructions. In fact, I could barely walk right, between fatigue and having my head bent down the whole time, peering at a grungy screen through sweaty lenses.

From noontime on, Lean Solid Girl was the one holding me together. And by dinner, she was literally holding me upright.

The only reason that I continued to function at all was that Lean Solid Girl staged the most heroic performance I’ve yet seen or heard of. Like a thousand-armed bodhisattva who appears in many places simultaneously, she kept driving ahead to scout out waypoints, talk me through the required photos and tags, and sometimes just took over Instagram entirely so I would only have to navigate. One moment she was pulling alongside and passing coffee through her car window, the next she was texting me with a route correction, then she materialized again at my waypoint with her camera ready to snap, and then she would vanish into traffic again. I can barely remember Saturday morning because of brain fog, but by that point it was Lean Solid Girl who had assumed the position of leader of my stumbling team-of-one. She had taken on as much of the navigation and communication functions as it was possible for a supernumerary to do, and I was basically just executing Function #1, walking.

In our conclusion, a dramatic fall, two heartbreaks, a victory, “the cookie jar,” and what it feels like to be homeless.

“Amazing!” I thought. “If you piss yourself in black running tights, it just looks like sweat!” At least to the casual observer. I was hobbling at top speed through a raunchy part of the Mission district that could have been in a documentary called Dirty Harry’s San Francisco, and fully a quarter of the men there also reeked of urine, so why not me?

This was the infamous Star Course, a 50-mile (80km) ruck race. In teams of two to five, athletes find their way on foot to a long list of waypoints in any order they choose and report back to the start point within 20 hours.

At 10am and still only halfway through the course, I was now alone and behind schedule. I had begun the previous night before in a team of four. We had walked through the night down the cliffs and beaches of San Francisco to an old missile base-turned-park 25 miles away, but near first light the team was in trouble. The others had run a half-marathon a couple weeks before and then put their house on the market that very day. They decided to brave the race anyway, but they were starting out on half a tank at best and withdrew once they knew they couldn’t make the 20-hour cutoff time.

I was marching on alone, still energetic but far behind schedule, but that was not my real problem. No, far worse was that I faced a return trip of 25 miles in broad daylight and needed to drink water by the liter with virtually no bathrooms. Well, more accurately, no bathrooms that would be open to me and—now that every single second mattered—without deviating off course every hour, maybe buying something, and waiting in a line.

I was seized by the full horror of the problem soon after I gulped down a cup of coffee brought by the angelic Lean Solid Girl. I bottoms-upped a venti breakfast blend without breaking step and felt like a million bucks for about ten minutes, when I understood that I had swallowed a time bomb. In fact, more like a grenade with no pin. In the distance I spotted a baseball diamond and ran for it, but I was much, much too late. There was only time to make sure that the man walking the Boston terrier did not witness my humiliation.

And then it was over. Taking stock of my situation, I found it not all that bad. Yes, I had pissed in my own clothes in public view, but on the plus side, I no longer had to go to the bathroom. Also, I would be walking along I-280, under bridges and into San Francisco, where people defecate on sidewalks so routinely that there is a specialized navigational app to help the discriminating pedestrian avoid human excreta. No one would look twice at a homeless-looking man in a motley ensemble of dirty military surplus and tights soaked with what might or might not be sweat. For sheer human deviance, I might as well have been in the Times Square of the pre-Giuliani years, except that in kindly San Francisco people would be too polite to stare or comment if they suspected my true condition.

And suspect they did. I am certain of it. The elderly Chinese woman walking near the underpass had clearly seen a few things in her time and knew something was up with my tights. The charming French couple at the Moraga Steps seemed to smile a little tensely as I approached. But so what? I would never see any of them again, and now that whole problem was solved. It really is true that once the bounds of decency are first broken and a taboo is ignored, further inhibition collapses swiftly and totally. I would refine my technique a bit, making sure that both legs appeared equally “sweaty” and keeping as much as possible out of my boots, but I was back in the race. I still had to navigate 20 more miles in 5 hours and hit ten more waypoints, but I had moved the dial back down from Completely Hopeless to just Almost Definitely F***ed.

This piece originally appeared in The American Moderate (Nov. 2017) under the title “Gun Rights Are Rights, Too.”

This conversation would be easier if it were about sex. I would propose to my fellow liberals that we get serious about rape culture through simple, commonsense regulations: No one could take a new sex partner without a background check and a 10-day waiting period, with a limit of one new partner per month. Why does anyone need more than that? (Very progressive states might even choose to require that you show police a legitimate reason for needing a new partner.) Rape would not disappear under my plan, but surely it would plummet.

The other liberals would crucify me—as well they should. But I would feign incomprehension: My plan promises to uproot an infamous scourge. How could any person be indignant?

When it comes to sexual and reproductive rights, my fellow liberals quickly re-discover their civil libertarian principles. They acknowledge a right to sleep with whom one chooses, to conceive a child, or choose an abortion. Even if someone promised social improvements if we, say, rationed abortions or required licenses for prospective parents, we would have none of it. And not simply from caution about the social science claims involved. Even if the science were a slam dunk (in a way that is rare), we would not buy some improved social measures at the cost of a woman’s sexual rights. We would stand fast on principle and repeat with Rachel Maddow, “Here’s the thing about rights. They’re not actually supposed to be voted on. That’s why they’re called rights.”

I am an armed liberal. A registered Democrat, I have never voted Republican, nor has any member of my family. I am a devout Buddhist. I also belong to two gun clubs and three rifle and pistol leagues and, like meditating, I handle guns every day. (Well, maybe not Christmas.)

Let me be clear: I support background checks, waiting periods, safe storage laws, and many of the same policies you do. I have never lived in a state without those laws, and there is a good chance that you have not either. (Guns are regulated mainly by the states, not Washington, and few people without guns know how loose or tight their states’ laws are.) In California we have universal background checks; drop-safety and storage regulations; limits on magazine capacities and semiautomatic rifles; and much more. In this we are entirely typical of all jurisdictions from Boston to DC and other Democratic strongholds like Illinois. I find these strictures nuisances, but mostly necessary and livable. Ordered liberty requires limits and I know virtually no one who disagrees. The question is what liberties and what limits.

We are all readier to limit other people’s freedoms. None of us finds a utilitarian calculus—a statistical weighing up of net costs and net benefits to society—so compelling when it concerns freedoms that we ourselves value. And in my leftist circles, it is lately popular to propose reducing gun crimes by reducing the gross number of guns: If the populace had 50% fewer guns, says this argument, there might be 50% less misuse. This appeals to the social planner in all of us, unless we ourselves will be affected.

Easy Wins

An easy way to make a big difference would be to enforce existing gun laws wholeheartedly. The ones we already have. Gun owners LOVE this idea. Our favorite example is “straw-man sales,” in which ex-convicts buy guns through an intermediary with no convictions, a “straw man.” This is hugely illegal and often easy to spot, but it is extremely common with guns used in crimes and almost never prosecuted. Both NPR and the National Review have published calls for crackdowns. Talk about strange bedfellows! This is a true win-win, and it is easy because the laws are already on the books.

Since we have an unequivocal, black-letter Constitutional right to bear arms, if we circumvent it, we set a precedent that others will try out on freedoms that we do care about and lack explicit Constitutional protection. They could promise to improve public health through commonsense measures concerning sex, parenting, abortion, and privacy.

If forced to, I doubt that I could make a utilitarian argument to defend allowing just anyone to bear a child, regardless of addictions, mental stability, family support, and income. I could easily be convinced statistically that we could eliminate most social ills (and many environmental ones) if we limited the right to have children to eligible people who could show a legitimate purpose. I could be persuaded of the same thing concerning panoptic surveillance or police profiling. But those things are not open to negotiation for better social indicators, or anything else. I hope.

Do we really want better morbidity rates? Through shared sacrifice? We could always revive the 55mph speed limit. It would affect Reds and Blues equally, save 12,500 lives annually (more than all gun homicides), and have zero Constitutional implications.

We are scared of you

This may surprise you, but we gun people are terrified of you. “But why?” you may ask in sincere wonder. “You have a powerful lobby in Congress. And a ton of guns!” First, even if we feel safe in Congress, the courts are another matter. Just as with abortion, we fear the day when the Supreme Court’s composition will change and yesterday’s right is reinterpreted. This fear is our sword of Damocles. Second, Congress has less power over us than our state laws. Here in California, as on the east coast, the legislature is solidly anti-gun and adds strictures every year. Some are laudable, but we do not know where they will stop. We suspect they will tighten the noose every year and choke off gun ownership by adding nuisances, much as red state legislatures could make abortions unavailable by shackling abortion clinics.

Above all, it terrifies us if you have no personal familiarity with guns and gun laws. So many of you have passionate convictions about guns and how to regulate them and you vote on those convictions but—I say this lovingly—get your impressions of guns and gun laws from entertainment, third-hand lore, and journalists who try hard but commit a lot of howling blunders. This is even true of high-profile gun legislators. Often they make hilarious terminological mistakes that make us doubt they understand the bills they are sponsoring. We gun people exchange those video clips and chortle at the legislators’ ignorance. (Admit it, you laugh at the idiots on our side too—it’s OK!) But it is nervous, queasy laughter: these people have the power to change our lives.

Human foot or cheap stew meat in butcher paper pulled from a dumpster?

“At GORUCK events, people’s foot care is surprisingly poor,” said the former ultra runner somewhere around Mile 20. I smarted at the comment, but I couldn’t deny it: the inside of my own boot was slowly grating my little toe like parmesan.

You meet a wide rainbow of fellow weirdos at GORUCK challenges with different athletic backgrounds, ranging from Crossfitters (the most numerous) all the way to equestrian gymnast(!). This was the first time I’d encountered a serious distance runner, though, and it became clear that that community was privy to an advanced science of foot health as foreign to the rest of us as architecture was to Visigoths and Huns.

At the moment, neither he nor I had breath for a long tutorial on the subject, but I resolved to study more after our team lost our second member of the night to foot injury and my own foot was being ground up into burger meat.

Here’s part of what I learned, most of it from Jon Vonhof’s Fixing Your Feet and friends like Scott H., Nick F., and Sgt. Šileika:

Your shoes are probably too small. As I’ve related before, I was wearing a 9½ when I should have worn a 10½ Wide. Ideally, get your feet measured by someone at a specialized store, like REI or a running store. And when you take the insoles out of your shoes and stand on them, if any part of your foot overhangs (or even reaches) the edges of the insole, you need bigger shoes.

Your feet get bigger with age, not least of all as they become more muscular with training! That seems strange–I always thought of my shoe size as an immutable given, like my height–but on reflection it’s perfectly intuitive. Feet are made mostly of muscle, and they respond to training like other muscles. If you start doing pull-ups for hours at a time, your back and arms will outgrow your shirts. Likewise, if you backpack for hours at a time, your foot muscles might well outgrow your old shoes.

Keep your feet dry. I hate this rule because I like charging through streams and doing water PT and I hate halting afterward to change socks, but it’s helped me stop getting Burgerfeet™.

Speaking of dry and happy feet, cotton socks are the devil. Wear wool or one of the new space-age moisture-wicking products. And it seems that most runners wear more than one sock layer.

Socks are like holsters: You have to try a bunch to find the right setup. You’ll end up with a drawer full of rejects–live with it.

And a sock setup that works with one pair of shoes does not necessarily work with another. (See “socks-are-like-holsters” above.)

Moisturize your feet every day. Most of the pros also lubricate their feet before they put on their socks.

Athletic tape from the corner drug store has been superseded by things like Leukotape and ENGO pads.

The débardeur GAO or chemise GAO. Quintessentially French, this man’s expression says it all: “With shirts like these, we are the masters of every hot climate we deign to visit. En fait, we would be the envy of the world if only we had ditched these hats, which apparently were designed as a team-building exercise between a Soviet puppet government and Japanese war criminals.”

The French really understand parched, roasting climates. From 200 years of walking around North Africa, they figured out what to wear for brain-boiling heat.

Call me an insufferable American chauvinist, but I rejoice that my ancestors left Strasbourg for a new land where they would be free to have short shorts with proper back pockets.

If you’re a regular reader of Lean, Solid Dogs, you already know that I love short shorts. And my favorites are surplus French Army shorts. Cheap, durable, and comfortable, they would be 100% perfect if not for the tragic European aversion to back pockets.

But my French cousins absolutely aced one other piece of hot weather gear: the GAO shirt. Think of it as an optimized tank top. Its most distinctive feature is that it doesn’t have sides, just straps that hold the front and back together while ventilating your body. For even more ventilation, there’s a deep V-neck that leaves about half your chest exposed to the air. Only the shoulders get extra coverage to protect them from the sun and the chafing of pack straps or other loads. And the designers even compensated for the lack of back pockets on their shorts but putting a sort of dump pouch across the small of the back, like some cycling jerseys have.

The GAO shirt’s origins are somewhat mysterious and people are unsure where the name comes from. It might be named after the Gao region of Niger, or it could be an acronym for “Operational Support Group” (Groupe d’Appui Opérationnel). What we do know is that it appeared in 1983 in Chad, when the French Army helped repel a Libyan invasion.

Beau travail (1999)

To my surprise, I’ve never seen a GAO shirt on anyone else in the United States. Peerless for hot, dry weather, they deserve to be better known. I first saw them years ago in Claire Denis’ film Beau travail and instantly saw how comfortable they would be.

French surplus GAO shirts are cheap but very difficult to buy from within the US for some reason, even in the age of Ebay and FedEx. However, they are easy to make. If you get hold a French specimen to copy, a sewing machine, and some 33% polyester ripstop fabric, you’re in business. If readers are dying for a pattern, drop us a line and I’ll do my best to provide you to provide you with one.

I weigh in for my first kettlebell competition in 2001 as Com. Angelo looks on. That day I weighed 156lbs. Granted, I had to cut some weight, but these days I’d have to cut off a leg.

This is an experimental post, summarizing my training for the past week. If I continue to publish these log entries, I won’t allow them to “crowd out” my usual material. I’d welcome your feedback in the Comments section.

July 6: I maxed out on 24kg kettlebell snatches: 32L + 32R. Showing poor judgment, I did this before my longest training ruck of the year. What was I thinking?! (Total snatch volume: 96 poods)

* “EDT,” or “escalating density training,” is a subject for another post. In this case, what’s happening is that I snatch for one minute, rest minute, and repeat ten times. You can find details at Eugene’s excellent blog, Girevoy Sport After 40.

July 13, 2019

Rucked 12 miles (20km) with 30lbs. in 3 hours, 11 minutes. It was a hot morning at 90° F (32° C). I didn’t march fasted, but I only drank a light smoothie before and no food during.

My foot muscles have been tired all week. Also, I found that heavy, sweaty socks add serious weight to my feet! As an experiment, I departed from my usual combination (FoxRiver sock liners and Finnish M05 “sock liners,” which are really light wool socks in their own right). Instead, under the Finnish socks I wore a midweight pair of Injinji toe socks. Perfectly comfortable, but when I peeled all that sweaty wool off my feet, the pile weighed half a pound! (And as we know, an extra pound on the foot is as taxing as five pounds in your pack.)

July 14, 2019

This marked the last day before I start to taper for the 50-mile Star Course three weeks away. Feet and calves tired from all the work.

1) “Russian EDT” snatches: 24kg for 10 sets of one minute at just 12 reps/minute. I slowed down so I could keep my heart rate under my MAF number.

Something very strange has happened with my bodyweight: I’m way more muscular than I “should” be. I’ve ballooned to a lean 182 lbs. (83kg). (In fact, I have more lean body mass now than I had total body mass last summer!) And yet I did just three months of barbell lifting over the course of the year, and since the spring I’ve done very little except for very-high-mileage rucking. All I can suppose is that maybe I’ve added so many mitochondria (the “powerhouses” of the muscle cells) that I gained 20lbs.?!